Partly in response to an on-line discussion group, and partly in response to a friend that I’ve been talking to, I’ve realised that the ‘military coup’ depicted on Battlestar Galactica isn’t what I thought it was. The president, Rosalin, deliberately sabotaged a military operation, and did so because the drugs she’s on have given her delusions of grandeur. The declaration of martial law, especially by the military itself, irked me to no end, but I’m forced to admit that that woman should not be in charge of a state.
The question I’m left with, then, is this: why did I have such a strong reaction against martial law that I sided with a drugged-up zealot? I think there are a series of really interesting answers to that question.
First, on a narrative level, I have no reason to believe that Rosalin isn’t a saviour, a prophecied leader who will bring salvation and peace to her people. A lot weird stuff happens on Battlestar Galactica, and whether or not the Colonial gods or the Cylon God actually exist is still up for grabs. I don’t expect a difinitive answer either way, but dismissing the possibility is what I’d do in the real world, not the fantasy world inside the show.
Second, on a logistical level, I’ll have to review the episodes in question, but the military, Cmdr Adama and Colonel Tigh, didn’t know that the president was, literally, taking crazy pills when they locked her up. They knew she was off on a religious tangent and that that tangent was not in synch with military operations, but they didn’t know the extent of it. So, saying that they were putting away a dangerous madwoman is accurate, but it doesn’t fully describe what they did in the moment. They merely ‘relieved’ her of duty based on her interference with a military operation. That was the explanation, both publically and privately, so her state of mind isn’t really at issue.
Third, they didn’t just remove her from power. They dismantled the entire democratic system on their little fleet, and that’s the part that bugs me. Rosalin, the individual, was unfit to be the president, but that doesn’t mean that democracy itself is inappropriate for the situation. That reasoning irks me. A lot. It makes the whole thing seem like an excuse to do what the military in the show explicitly wanted to do way back in the first episodes (the 2003 mini-series): run the whole fleet under the command of Galactica itself. There are many who argue that that’s the most appropriate thing to do, regardless, that the situation they’re in warrents, effectively, a military dictatorship. Realistically, I could be persuaded of that, but from a representational point of view, I just can’t.
As much as this show has successfully integrated a lot of realism (read here as a genre) into its otherwise science-fictional plot, it’s still a commentary on politics, specifically American politics. The situations in the show are too similar to those that America is in right now for us to read the show as its own, self-contained universe. The President’s ship is called ‘Colonial One,’ the Colonies’ primary legal documents, the ‘Articles of Colonisation,’ are so far almost identitical to the American Constitution, even calling their worlds the twelve colonies implies a comparison to the US (in fact, they were originally a reference to the twelve tribes of Israel as depicted in Mormon mythology, but that’s neither here nor there). The show is about the United States of America and its present political situation, complete with a state at war and a president who’s a religious nut (NB: ‘religious’ and ‘nut’ are not mutually inclusive terms, but if the shoe fits…).
As such, I read the show as I read most sci-fi and fantasy, as a literal representation of how people percieve their situation. A lot of Americans really do think that they’re basic way of life is under imminent threat of annihilation by a foreign threat. Fewer, but still a lot, of Americans think that Martial Law might be a the best way to defend against that threat. At the very least, they’re comfortable seeing their democratic system and their personal rights slowly dismantled for the sake of ‘security.’ Despite the quite logical reasoning for the military’s decision to depose a sitting president, and despite the fact that that president is a total nutter, the actual declaration of martial law by people who have no legal right to do so, and under somewhat false pretences, just scares the shit out of me.
Posted by orion at August 11, 2005 6:19 PM | TrackBack